People chearleading lockdowns here, are completely misguided. There's really no evidence that it were masks or lockdowns. (There's really no evidence that mask and/or lockdowns do absolutely anything to COVID or flu, now or in the past, BTW).
20x more people died from covid WITH masks/lockdowns than during a normal flu season WITHOUT precautions.
masks/lockdowns have been so effective that there's hardly ANY flu this season because the flu is a LOT less contagious.
Had there been no lockdown, how much life would've been lost? 10x that? Would 6 million lives matter more to you than 600k that should've lived?
I had covid 13 months ago. I have all the symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia and anxiety/depression which I had before but I've never had daily mid-day panic attacks where I can't breath and feel like the world is crashing down around me - til this year.
I've worked from home for 6 years, I'm a stay-home kind of person on non-pandemic years, only major difference is now I wear a mask which I can still breathe in, by the way.
I've had the flu countless times in my life, never have I had after-effects that lasted 13 fucking months. Go to /r/covidlonghaulers and try to convince them it's all "just a flu" many of which were at one point anti-maskers, and "my freedumb" enthusiasts and have changed their tune.
Wow this study says lockdowns don't work, social distancing doesn't work, and masks help a little under ideal circumstances (real circumstances not studied). I'm surprised to see a study that admits these things here on HN.
This is literally what "COVID deniers" have been saying since the lockdowns started. Yes, some people are extreme about the masks, but the lockdowns have always been the most serious infraction on our liberties and lives.
I wonder how many people died of induced mental or economic despair due to the lockdowns, which are still in place in some places, a year later, when we have ample evidence that their only effect is the destruction of livelihoods, especially of small business owners.
That doesn’t prove the people doing these voluntary lockdowns had any different of an outcome than if they did nothing at all.
Way to many people just blindly assume these interventions worked. The fact is we have zero clue if they did anything or the outcomes experienced by different regions was a result of a bunch of stuff that is completely out of our control.
If I was gonna bet, my money would be on the lockdowns not doing anything. The virus did what it did no matter how hard humans tried to control it. We had as little control over covid as we have control over other natural disasters like tornadoes and hurricanes.
The problem is assuming that no mask mandate means nobody wears masks. As the top poster said, people still wore masks, but it wasn't forced. I suspect this is true of a number of places that didn't have mask mandates.
Also, what we are calling lock downs, weren't really good lock downs. People still went out, people still went to the grocery store and other stores, and other places. I happen to be friends with a contact tracer, and the problem was the lock downs actually made the pandemic worst in a number of cases. If someone got sick in a household, everyone in the house got sick. I would argue if everyone is stuck in the house together and someone gets sick, there is no escape. By the time the person has even figured out they are sick, it's too late because everyone is home all of the time. Now, that's not to say without lock downs this wouldn't have still happened, but the lock downs practically guarantee that someone sharing a house with a sick person is spending most of their day in that location exposed to covid.
I think it's too early to know if lock downs were that useful. I don't think we will know for years as more data is gathered and people look at the kind of lock downs, and places that didn't do lock downs. Maybe some places that didn't do lock downs did well due to a different climate, or because they were more rural. But this would lead to the conclusion that maybe lock downs are not the best solution for all places, maybe they are good for cities and not as useful for rural areas. I think that's something that we might find out in the future.
You can't make a half-counterfactual comparison like that because the COVID rate may have been impacted by the lockdown.
Assume, for the sake of argument, that lockdowns worked smashingly well. Then, you'd see a) very few COVID deaths and b) relatively more "side effects". That is exactly what you're using to argue that they didn't work.
> Lockdowns didn't do squat to prevent those deaths.
They have done for some countries. Lockdowns _done badly_, I agree, didn't do squat.
> What should have been done instead is to figure out what factors cause Covid complications, One year in and we still haven't even started...
You seriously don't think people are researching that like crazy? Good science, sadly, takes time. Especially when trying to measure an _ongoing_ pandemic.
> (We spent so much time and effort on vaccines instead, even though there are several strains of Covid in the wild and people routinely get it twice...)
I've had the flu multiple times in my life. Only had it once since I started getting vaccinated for it annually 16 years ago.
As an asthmatic, I really appreciate the flu vaccine. (And likewise, really keen on a Covid vaccine, my lungs are rough enough already, cheers).
And I really appreciate it even though there are several strains of flu in the wild and people routinely get it twice (or more).
My bias and hypocrisy - if that was your goal you have failed. All you have shown is that you have an ax to grind. I haven't talked about lockdown measures at all, only in response to you bringing them up. And at that I haven't even said anything. Like I said before, you have an ax to grind and aren't reading what I am writing.
I will wade in here. Lock down measure do restrict the spread of covid - that I won't refute - and that is scientific in nature and if you are of scientific worth you can't deny that. It's merely physics - if people don't see each other there is no ability to transmit the illness. The debate that you are referring to is whether the severity of the lockdown measures are worth the cost. Thats a political calculation. I haven't waded into that in any of my comments and don't intend now.
The investigators did look at the fomite/supplies idea but couldn't find any records or recollections of new supplies being opened.
"Even if it were possible for someone to infect you from thousands of miles away with no intermediary save the wind it wouldn't be likely"
Isn't this just an assumption based on your pre-existing intuitions? How do you know?
"nor would it change the average dynamic where masks and lockdowns decrease spread in far more normal scenarios."
Lockdowns and masks don't decrease the spread. That's the point, that's why alternative explanations are necessary. Go look at case graphs for regions where you aren't familiar with the local laws, and try to draw a line on the graph where mask mandates/lockdowns were brought in or removed. You can't do it, I've tried. The graphs are always basically smooth and organic looking except for measurement artifacts. If these tactics worked there should be sharp, clearly artificial jumps and drops in case numbers 3 days after a mask mandate / lockdown is brought in or cancelled but that never happens. In fact in the UK, their "freedom day" where mandates were cancelled was followed three days later by a sharp DROP in cases. That's the exact opposite of what you'd expect. It doesn't mean anything though, it's just a funny coincidence, as becomes clear when you look at a wider span of data.
Now you're claiming that viral spread on the wind is incredibly unlikely. Epidemiologists do not agree. They agree for SARS-CoV-2 but for other epidemics in the past this idea has been taken very seriously and is the subject of entire research papers. Even Neil Ferguson at Imperial College London, Mr Lockdown himself, based his models for foot-and-mouth disease on the assumption of long range windborne transmission. Ferguson has never claimed those models and understandings were wrong, in fact after the event he claimed victory (the tactic that time was mass killings of farm animals). Somewhere between 2000 and 2020 his team lost interest in windborne transmission without ever explaining why. It's not for microbiological reasons. No epidemiological predictions have any link to microbiology.
You're claiming motivated reasoning by me, but that isn't true. At the beginning I thought lockdowns and masks would work too. I was very surprised when they very clearly had zero effect on case curves, and very angry when lots of people decided to simply ignore that fact for what looked like ideological reasons (like loyalty to the academic "expert" classes). I know about these cases where airborne transmission was taken seriously exactly because after the 6ft droplet model failed to generate useful predictions I went digging to try and figure out why.
Should be. lockdowns should be total or none. Masks are stupid and honestly have so little evidence supporting them it's pathetic, and the lockdowns have two champion countries and everyone else is statistically insignificant when you compare with their annual expected flu response curves
I don't know what you mean by "lockdown". That's not a term of art, it's something used mostly among right wing people arguing against mitigation strategies via hyperbole.
The word lockdown has been widely used for the entire past year by people across the political spectrum, to refer to mandatory stay-at-home orders, business closures and so on. You know this already of course, but are determined to view this through ideological lenses.
As for obviously working and being nonsensical to claim otherwise, it's the opposite: the data is extremely clear that they have no effect whatsoever and quite a lot of all-country statistical analyses have been done that show that rigorously. For example, here is one such paper:
"Rapid border closures, full lockdowns, and wide-spread testing were not associated with COVID-19 mortality per million people"
But again, to see this, you don't really need sophisticated analysis. You can just look at the case curves for different regions that did or did not use these tactics.
Re: influenza. We're talking about COVID here, so influenza is irrelevant, controlling the flu wasn't the goal of lockdowns. However, there is some evidence that suggests you can't be infected with more than one respiratory virus at once, so it's possible SARS-CoV-2 simply kicked influenza out. But given the extremely lax symptom classification of COVID it's also possible influenza cases have simply been reclassified. Regardless of the explanation it's not actually relevant: neither lockdowns nor mask mandates had any impact on COVID and there is abundant evidence to this effect. The real question we should be asking is why not, and there unfortunately there are quite a few plausible explanations but nothing conclusive. And the people who are paid to figure that out (epidemiologists) all seem to be in denial and still pretending their models were never invalidated, so they're not much help.
The lockdowns were not ineffective. They were only less effective because of people who cried "muh freedumbs". Masks have repeatedly shown to be effective, especially the N95/KN95 variety. Vaccines were shown to be very effective, if not 100% preventative. Big Tech is not a publisher and expects you to be skeptical of things you read that don't come from mainstream sources. Mainstream sources, other than Fox, tend to have some bias, but almost always contain facts they are based on. Fox however regularly breaks that trust between media and viewers/readers and has been called out over and over.
----
There are tens of thousands of stories that go out every day without errors. Pulling 8 or 10 stories out of those thousands upon thousands of stories that go out on legit news sources being incorrect or slipping in way too much does not bring into question the other 99.99% legit stories. You aren't making much sense to me here. Almost a million people have died above and beyond what normally would not have died in the USA due to Covid-19. I don't know about you, but that makes me extremely sad with the knowledge that 70-80% of those deaths could have been prevented with vaccines, masking, and observing proper protocols. It breaks my fucking heart to be honest, and I didn't even lose anyone close to me personally.
Please take a look at the study before making such an offhand comment. It clearly shows that these effects are more likely for people who actually got COVID than for the control cohort, who experienced the same lockdown measures, by a factor of 80%.
The point is that a huge portion of businesses were completely open through the entire pandemic. A large number of people did not follow health guidelines.
You say it wasn’t a bad idea, which it was, and articles like this are people trying to find an excuse why it wasn’t so bad they forced their bad idea on everyone else.
And the next trick is ‘oh my god are we still debating the lockdown?’ Yeah let’s just forget about that thing where you just forced your bad ideas on everyone else.
We’re not going to stop debating the lockdown, it’s getting clear and going to get ever more clear that it didn’t help and hurt a lot and made a lot of people distrustful in science, just because a few phonies twisted it to back their own little flawed lockdown theories.
You can’t tread on peoples rights like this and expect them to just take it. If you had just locked down yourself and not forced your ideas on others then we could just talk about whether it was a good idea or not. Which it clearly wasn’t. But that’s not what happened. You had to force your flawed idea on others. And now they are going to keep telling you it was a flawed idea from the start, you could have known, your politicians could have known, your science figureheads could have known, but they didn’t, they are phonies spreading fake science to trick you and your politicians into their flawed lockdown ideas. And you fell for it.
Here’s the clue: COVID is over because it mutated into something that is not dangerous anymore. Just like it always happens. Lockdowns delay that process so it drags on for longer. Which is totally pointless and wasteful and antisocial because the progress of the epidemic is a burden that you then put onto others that can’t afford the lockdown. Either because they are in some county that can’t afford it or because they are in your country but have to work anyway, they are in some essential industry creating your food, or they are providing your care. Do you think people in Africa could just shelter at home for a few years?
And then this delay may have been useful when there was a wait for the vaccines but unfortunately it turned out they didn’t really work, they don’t prevent spread and they only work for a very short time. Too bad. And that’s the moment where there is no more benefit to lockdowns, only harm, and any real scientist should have told you that and any scientist that didn’t is a phony political fake scientist. A harmful flunky that you shouldn’t listen to. And that’s the real story and it’s going to be told whether you like it or not. And whether you paper over it with excuses or not. You took peoples rights because you were scared into believing in flunkies so badly you couldn’t think for yourself anymore. Because if you did anyone could have seen it coming.
I am honestly amazed at the level of nonsense and fatalism from your post. As if common physics and virology doesn't apply to this virus.
Of course masking works. Why wouldn't it? It had a tremendous impact of making a virus that has a R0 of more than 3 spread rather slowly.
We don't have to argue about lockdowns anymore because we won't be getting another one. There are more nuanced tools available now. But of course lockdowns have worked to delay spread. It is just basic physics that you can't get infected if you don't spend time with somebody infected.
Last, your rejection of any measures does not make any sense. We are in the first winter after a tremendously successful vaccination campaign (over 10x risk reduction for those vaccinated). It is appropriate to keep some measures with high impact on spread and low impact on freedom (such as masks!) to slow the current wave to help the healthcare system.
It's more likely that COVID just out-competed the normal flu. https://twitter.com/kylamb8/status/1317186379483406337
reply